On Clive James' The River in the Sky

On Clive James’ The River in the Sky



A famous and powerful man, a sort of emperor, senses that death is imminent.  In ancient Egypt, the ruler’s retainers would gather together treasures that the dying man required in the next world.  Rare foodstuffs would be packaged.  Unguents and perfumes would be squeezed into alabaster and jade vessels.  Weapons and thrones, favorite horses, chariots, luxury household items – all of these precious things would be assembled to be interred in the ruler’s tomb.  In some cultures, slaves, wives, and concubines would be slaughtered so as to accompany their lord on his celestial journey.  An Egyptian pharaoh, Clive James tells at the outset of his final book-length poem,  The River in the Sky, would be provisioned for “endless travel/Across the sea of stars...to immortality.” These regal preparations for death are the occasion and subject of James’ book.  As he feels death approaching, James searches his memory for the riches that he wishes to accompany him into the hereafter: “Boats in the windows, treasures on the terrace/As if I weren’t just Pharaoh’s tomb designer” but, instead, “the living god in the departure lounge/ Surrounded by his glistering aftermath.”  James begins by summoning favorite books from his library – characteristically this selection is a culling: he has “weeded his books” to a select few, the volumes that are central to his existence on this earthly plane and, later, in an afterlife in which the poet doesn’t believe.  But from these “few thousand/ Pages of print and plates”, James is led to the vision of “the boats” and the terrace “treasures”.  The boats are the celestial vessels that will carry him across “the river in the sky”, the heavenly path traced by the Milky Way, but also anchored by books (“books are the anchors left by ships that rot away”).  The anchors are embedded in mud – the mud is “one’s recollections/Of what life was, and never, late, or soon/ Will be again.”  Death is coming, although whether “late or soon” remains unknown.  The poem substitutes for a body of flesh and blood – it is an instrument for immortality.

James’ method is, at first, transitive: with his daughter, he has culled (‘weeded’) his books.  Books are what remains of human voyages (either in spirit or reality) – the anchors of the boats that have rotted away just as human beings die and decompose.  But there is a rich mud that embraces the book-anchors, a context, as it were, for those treasures – and this context of memories of a lifetime’s pleasures must also be amassed, scrutinized, and enjoyed before embarking on the “journey” that is “no journey” but only a “long aching pause” that is all the “voyage there will ever be”.  In the face of annihilation, the dying poet summons those precious things that enriched his life and praises them.  He imagines an interlocutor, Adrastus (the name means “Courage”) to whom he addresses the catalog of wonders that comprises the poem. This is the argument of The River in the Sky (2018).

Clive James is less well-known to American readers than many of his contemporaries and should be better appreciated.  His lack of fame on this side of the Atlantic is unfair.  James was a great poet and a marvelous polymath as well.  Born in Australia, he lived for most of his career in Cambridge, England, although he traveled extensively in the United States and, it seems, everywhere else as well.  In the early seventies James moved to London after a picaresque youth in Sydney, Australia – there, he knew Germaine Greer (whom he describes with transparent malice in his memoirs as “Romaine Rand”) and other luminaries of the Push Movement, a sort of Fluxus in the Downunder with notes of the American “Summer of Love” and Andy Warhol’s Factory.  For many years, James wrote weekly columns for British newspapers, composed essays and wrote poems.  He is a brilliant, aphoristic and wholly lucid prose stylist, modeling his work off the great Austrian writers of the period between the world wars – he has described his debt to these authors in his magisterial work Cultural Amnesia.  In the 1980s and, thereafter, James was a popular “presenter,” that is, TV host on the BBC.  He provided literate and avuncular commentary on the arts, films, and subjects as diverse as World War II airplanes and Formula One racing (he is an expert on both topics).  He could write gracefully on all subjects – for instance, he is a connoisseur of rugby and cricket, translated the entirety of Dante’s Divine Comedy into rhyming tercets in 2013, wrote lyrics for six albums of satiric songs, and mastered the tango to the extent that he had a dance-floor specially constructed for the practice of that art in his home at Cambridge.  So far as I can see, he knows everything about jazz and opera.  He was friends with the good and great – Princess Diana was a close and intimate acquaintance and he knew just about everyone worth knowing in the world.  Throughout much of his life, he drank heavily and smoked 80 cigarettes a day.  In 2014, as he was dying, he wrote a beautiful and now famous lyric called “Japanese Maples” published in The New Yorker and widely regarded as his swan-song.  But, in fact, experimental medical treatments kept him alive until November 24, 2019 when he died at age 80.  James said that he was embarrassed that his demise didn’t occur when it was anticipated in 2014, but, he made the best of it, writing a column entitled “Reports of My Death” for The Guardian  He survived long enough to write his epic poem, The River in the Sky published about a year before his belated demise.

On first reading, The River in the Sky seems largely decorative, a rococo catalog of the poet’s enthusiasms and pleasures.  But, in fact, on closer study, the poem turns out to be ingeniously constructed, hinged and jointed in complicated ways with recurring systems in its imagery.  A good example of the poem’s intricate network of associations occurs in a passage alluding to James’ visit to the Boboli Gardens in Florence.  (James long-suffering spouse, Prue, was a reader in Italian literature at Cambridge and a renowned Dante scholar in her own right – presumably they were Florence in 1968 while she was studying there.)  James notes that in the decaying Boboli Gardens “the orpiment degrades” – “orpiment” is an odd word, one that I had to look-up on the internet.  As it happens, “orpiment” describes an orange-yellow pigment extracted from volcanic sulphur.  This kind of pigment was used on facades in the Boboli Gardens and the color was a luxury item in antiquity, exactly the sort of thing that a drowsy Byzantine emperor with a mechanical singing bird would prize.  Furthermore, several of the artifacts in King Tutankhamun’s tomb were lacquered in orpiment.  (The pigment occurs in another tomb as well, the Taj Mahal.)  The reference to orpiment, accordingly, has a voluptuous funereal tint – a cast that is consistent with the themes in the poem. 

James’ organizes the verse around certain events or nodes of intense meaning to which he returns periodically.  One thematic melody, as it were, involves the death of his father.  James’ father was captured by the Japanese in World War II, tortured and almost starved to death, but miraculously survived the prison camp where he was interned.  At the end of the war, too weak to walk James’ father was nursed to sufficient health that he could return to Jannali in Australia, where his wife and son, Vivien (James’ given first name) were awaiting him.  But, on the flight home, the plane crashed and James’ father, with all his comrades, died.  (He is buried at Sai Wan Bay, Hong Kong as mentioned on the first page of the poem.)  James views the death of his father, whom he never really knew, as the event that nudged him into literature and the arts – after all, his father died in the most “ironic” and literary manner imaginable, the sort of evil coincidence upon which many novels and short stories depend.  Throughout the poem, James alludes to his father’s strange death repeatedly – often he will use a metonym for this motif, the “Pratt and Whitney” engine that powered the lost plane.  (And this is in keeping with James’ fascination with motorized vehicles of all sorts, motorcycles, fighter planes, and fast cars – for instance, the wrecked Facel Vegas that Camus was driving when he crashed and died, or the Hispano-Suiza in which the great travel writer (and one of James’ acquaintances) Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “exotic mistress...park(ed) her shapely bottom on the bumper.)   Other organizing links involve the city of Petropolis, the Imperial capitol of Brazil, a place James’ describes as a kind of earthly paradise, and Rio de Janeiro (“the river of January”) another Eden that the poet equates to the Milky Way --  the titular “river in the sky” that is the starry path to the Next Life as well as a constellation of glowing computer diodes that James imagines as also a simulacrum for the celestial river.  (The glowing lights must be near his sick-bed.)  Divers also fascinate James: the motion of leaping and falling, another representation for death, is a central metaphor – we see the Chinese Olympic diver Ren Quian tumbling through the air, Primo Levi committing suicide by throwing himself from his balcony, and American GI’s at Luna Park at Sydney slipsliding down an amusement ride in “Coney Island Hall” in the grandiose amusement park.  (Luna Park was built four years before James’ birth in 1935.) James writes: “Soldiers dive down the hill-high slippery dips... gripping their thin slick mats, harbingers of the boogie board.”

The first half of the book culminates in two extended sequences that illustrate James’ mise-en-scene.  The first involves the tango.  The second reverts to Luna Park and its “River Caves” ride.  The tango scene is set in sultry Buenos Aires.  James practices his art with a brilliantly adroit woman who happens to be “stone blind” – the poet tells her that he looks like Errol Flynn.  James can be supremely self-aggrandizing, even boastful: he claims that he danced magnificently with her and that he has never forgotten her, and, indeed, in a venerable poetic cliche says that she “is with you” now, “my young male readers, poets of the future” – that is, he has immortalized her, but, most particularly, her eerie blindness.  James cites the lyrics to a famous tango “La Comparista” (“The Little March”) Spanish words that mean: “Who knows if you knew I had never forgotten you.”  The detail is precise: traditionally “La Comparista” is the last dance of the night.

There follows an extended fantasia on the “River Caves” beginning with the words “At the far end of the river in the sky/ Would be the river caves” – an image for James’ dream “(o)f how my life might end.”  The “River Caves” was an attraction at Luna Park, a tunnel of love or “dark ride” of the kind called an “Old Mill” in the United States.  Couples ride through a pitch-black grotto on shallow keel boars pulled through a couple of feet of water by a conveyor mechanism.  The River Cave provides a place for courting couples to kiss and pet – these kinds of attractions have been largely supplanted by amusement park “thrill rides” since, nowadays, boys and girls can do pretty much anything they want in public.  (A prominent local example of such a ride is Ye Old Mill” at the Minnesota State Fair, a sedate concrete tube built next to plashing water-wheel, far from the Midway.  When I was a little boy, I always took the boat ride in the darkness – I was scared of the wild, neon-outlined rides on the Midway – but never exactly understood the point of the excursion through the dark, cool tunnels.)

In James’ fantasy, Luna Park is now called “Dream Land” and the ticket-taker is the poet’s elementary school teacher who calls him by his first name “Vivien.”  Later, the ticket-taker transforms into (improbably) Mies van der Rohe, the architect – an opportunity for the contrarian James to praise the Farnsworth House (Mies’ work) as greater than Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Falling Water.”  James has to pay for the ride with Weimer-currency, vastly inflated, a whole naugahyde bag of bills in exchange for access to the River Caves boat-ride.  The dead have now gathered – every epic must contain a visit to the Underworld.  We see Fellini’s father suavely slipping into his grave as shown in 8 ½ and, then, other lovers appear as depicted in movies, all of them dead now, and described as a “catalogue” of famous couples, similar to those depicted in the mad whirlwind in Dante’s Inferno.  Here the whirlwind is domesticated to the big churning waterwheel.  In the River Caves, James recalls a girl whom he groped, unnamed in the poem because “she/ Might yet breathe”.  The tunnel of love becomes vaginal with a reference to Courbet’s “The Origin of the World” and, then, the spinning water wheel becomes “a blur/ The propeller of a Pratt & Whitney Twin/Wasp radial engine...”,that is, the engine of the plane on which James’ father was flying home from World War Two when the fatal crash occurred.  As dreams often end in a vision so horrific that it wakes the sleeper, James sees his father’s starved body “wasted almost to nothing”.  The shock knocks him awake although he knows that he will return once more to the River Caves when death finally takes him.  And, now aroused, James describes his Sydney, inhabited by other specters, the elegant old Jewish ladies who escaped the Holocaust to open tea-shops in Australia. 

James’ exploration of the River Caves, a symbol that condenses the poem’s meaning brilliantly, represents the long poem’s apex, its climax both formally and emotionally.  Regrettably, the poem loiters, like its doomed but indefatigable poet, for another 75 pages or so – the River Caves sequence concludes on 47 of a book that will continue to 122 pages.  Although James is witty and never less than entertaining to read, the poem’s energy leaches out in the end, weakening in a way that seems congruent to the dying poet’s ultimately lethal fatigue. The River in the Sky continues to glory in astronomical imagery – the doomed man’s expedition into the sky is aimed toward Andromeda, a constellation to which the Milky Way is imagined to lead.  Egyptian references, particularly to Karnak and King Tutankhamun decorate the poem and the program for the text is made explicit: “Give credit to my gathered images/As if they might come with me/Just as if the afterlife/Were life itself.”  References to fighter planes and aviators abound – the air plane that carried James’ father to his death is mirrored in other craft that represent the chariot conveying the old man to his death, “sky-burial” he says at one point, referring both to the Tibetan mortuary practice by which cadavers are fed to vultures and condors, the airplane (and rockets) aiming his body toward Andromeda, and Khailash, the black ebony peak in the Himalayan mountains, worshiped by all major religions on the subcontinent and, forever preserved inviolate against the profane cleats and ice picks of mountain climbers.  As a peri-mortem ritual, James releases “every lyrical memory...towards where the sky turns into jewelry.”

As the poem advances toward its ending, James accelerates the pace of allusions, filling up the veins of the verse with jazz musicians, Tv shows that he once enjoyed (he likes The West Wing), opera singers that he admires, movie stars, books, and more memories of the River Caves.  He drops names like petals all over the pages.  A lot of this is a little obscure, although all the allusions are easily traced via Wikipedia, and, in fact, the gist of James’ references is generally clear even without recourse to the electronic encyclopedia and gazetteer.   James likes nature documentaries and seems to be friends with David Attenborough.  Pages 106 and 107 are representative: James begins by referencing a scene from Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers – he reverts here to imagery previously established about Camus, who was Algerian, and wishes to make a point that torture (prominently featured in the film) is, probably, the essence of war.  But, then, he leaps sideways into the animal kingdom, alleging that the death of the “foot-flagging frog” at the hands of an “Aussie spider with the headlights” is also “war.”   The image is a little unclear – either the spider is a sports car running over a frog hopping too slowly across a road or an actual Huntsman spider, a foot-wide monstrosity known to kill and eat frogs and small rodents.  (Go on the internet if you dare and watch the spider draining the juice out of a small possum.)  What cars (or spiders) do to kill frogs isn’t exactly war under any definition that I know and the writing is more than a little imprecise.  Next, James tells us that an ostrich runs with the stride of Czech Olympic long-distance racer, Emil Zatopek.  (These lines are purely associative – the frog is “foot-flagging” in contrast to the fleet-footed ostrich and the Olympic track star.)  Then, we’re told about hermit crabs “trad(ing) up” for “bigger shelters” – James speculates about how the hermit crab views its change of domicile, an image, probably, for the poet losing his corporeal body to go on the sky-voyage through the stars – although this isn’t clear and is a speculative interpretation that I have devised to try to make sense of the puzzling leaps and lunges in the latter half of the poem.  James brings Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits to the party – presumably because he enjoys that music and wants to add them to the list of things that gave him pleasure during his life.  The preening of the rock star becomes the sexual display of a fish that bloats himself into colorful balloon caricature only to be deflated by his mate who cavalierly says: “Do you think you could do that thing again?” referring to some exotic sexual bagatelle that the male is too exhausted to repeat.  If a fish is good, then, a small gaudy shark is better and James brings one in from the Great Barrier Reef.  Then, he makes a little (very little) wildlife joke – the next stanza reads in whole: “Behold the pygmy marmoset/Okay where is it?”  Tired of the animal kingdom, James, then, switches subjects, returning to theme of divers and diving – a symbol for flying up and, then, down into death.  At a pool called Sans Souci, young James climbs a tower to dive into the water.  (Sans Souci is a “tidal pool” in the Sydney suburbs built on the seaside in 1933 – tidal pools are swimming enclosures that are walled off from the actual ocean but full of sea-water.  They are very popular institutions in Australia.)  The poem now reverts to wild life – the pool is full of jelly fish and James has to aim his dive to avoid hitting them.  The jelly fish viewed from the diving tower look like the Hiroshima bomb bursting as seen from the bomber – a startling metaphor that conflates diving, falling, bombing, and violent death.  James’ next associative leap is looser and more difficult: he turns to the French artist, Yves Klein.  One of Klein’s most famous works is a photo-montage called “Into the Void.”  The black and white photograph seems to show the artist wearing a dark suit diving off the roof of a building.  The picture is astonishing and Klein’s body seems be really propelled into the air from the edge of the roof.  The picture shows diving, one of the signature motifs in The River in the Sky but here James doesn’t overtly refer to the photo-montage although I think its subconsciously behind the transition.  Instead the connection to the preceding text is more obscure – Klein invented a bluer-than-blue ultramarine, a pigment named after him as “Klein Blue”.  The poet imagines the pigment being “splashed” – “a splash of ultramarines”.  A diver “splashes”into the pool into which he plunges.  The lapis lazuli pigment used on King Tutankamun’s mask is similarly “ultramarine” like “the gouts” of pigment Klein (“the kid”) splashes on his canvases.  This vibrant blue summons to mind the color that the Japanese artist, Hokusai, used in his woodcut prints.  And, then, a few pages later, as James contemplates his imminent death, we’re reminded that Hokusai, on his death bed (he was 88), asked the gods for “just five more years” so that he “might become a true painter.”  (Although James doesn’t summon this image, I recall one of Goya’s last drawings, a crayon sketch showing an ancient man with a long white beard tottering forward on two canes.  The words Aun Aprendo are written on the drawing – that is, “I am still learning.”)

As should be evident, James’ web of associations becomes more diffuse as the poem hastens toward its end.  There’s a sense of palpable haste.  Time is running out and James wants to catalog as many of his life’s pleasures as he can before he’s swept away.  The impulse to list these experiences is noble, but aesthetically unsuccessful – the poem deflates, notwithstanding some extraordinary moments in its last half.  Indeed, conscious that the web of allusions has grown too broad, the poet tightens the final pages with thirty lines of rhymed verse, arranged in three taut ten-line stanzas, celebrating his “autumn’s autumn.”  The italicized rhymed verse is nicely done, but rueful and with a dying fall – James laments that he’s lost the former “ease” with which he “could command at will,/the music of the syllables.” 

Viewed as a whole, James’ poem The River in the Sky is problematic.  In the final analysis, it’s more a list than a poem, although, of course, epic verse often indulges in catalogs.  James’ collage technique is intrinsically modernist and compels comparison with Eliot’s The Waste Land, also a network of allusions and literary references.  Eliot’s poem fuses fragments together to represent the chaos of sensation and the crisis of representation after the First World War – “these fragments,” Eliot tells us, “I have shored against my ruins.”  The Waste Land depicts the desolation exposed after the Great War shattered all of the foundations of civilization.  James’ The River in the Sky is thematically opposed to Eliot’s vision of a world darkened by the retreat of those cultural verities that once, albeit only tentatively, held things apart.  (Eliot’s famously reactionary nostalgia for the Catholic middle ages is evidence of the deep malaise that he perceived in the modern world).  James’ assumes that the culture doesn’t cohere.  He makes this apparent in a scene in which Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and Terry Southern (the author of Red-dirt Marijuana, a book that the poet praises) attend a screening of L’Avventura in Paris in 1960.  Antonioni’s film is about the failure of meaning – a young woman mysteriously vanishes during a holiday trip to the Aeolian Islands; the characters spend the next two hours of the film listlessly searching for her, until, at last, they more or less forget the meaning of their quest; the girl’s disappearance no longer signifies anything.  Southern is bored by the film and falls asleep.  Mingus and Davis devise a bebop melody to accompany the images, singing at the screen.  James’ is diverted from Antonioni’s dour high Modernist masterpiece by the leading lady Monica Vitti’s beauty – he lists the actresses on-screen in the film and reminds us of the time that “Vitti became every grown man’s dream”.  A fable about the failure for things to add up, about the enigma and alienation of modern life, becomes an appreciation of an actress’ beauty.  James doesn’t expect things to make sense – he just wants to remember images, phrases of jazz, art works and women that gave him pleasure.  He catalogs these things in his treasure-house of a poem as the “touchstones” or the measure of his life.  Things cohere only in his sensibility, that’s the only unity that he can give the poem.

Clive James is indomitable, courageous, a wise comrade.  He offers us the best that he can – that is, himself.  And despite my reservations about the slack parts of the poem, this gift is, I think, enough to recommend The River in the Sky to most readers.

On the Coronavirus (II)

1.
Filthy weather – April 3, 2020.  Cold dawn eking out a little grey light.  Sky no higher than the tops of the trees.  Droplets of ice have frozen shut the cover to the garbage bin and there is a moist, chill bite to the air.

In the alleyway:  a figure in black, head to toe, black sneakers, black sweat pants, black hood concealing face.  The black shape carries a back pack, also black.  It sweeps through the lane between the houses and disappears.


2.
The fog has descended, chaos as the pestilence expands and ramifies.  The news is a wilderness of fearsome conjecture and the contagion now is everywhere, hydra-headed, seizing the totality of human affairs and turning them to its dire purposes.  Everything, all human interactions and institutions, are contaminated.

The schools are closed and the kids, without anything to do, grow increasingly feral and desperate.  In fact, idle hands are the devil’s playground.  The federal government aiming to indemnify the poor, at least, to some limited extent is drowning in debt that will take a half-century to repay.  Hospitals can’t process bills and are slipping into bankruptcy.  Tenants can’t pay rent due on the first and are marching in the streets to demand rent forgiveness and the landlords are failing, abandoning property that they no longer have resources to repair.  The prisons are full of contagion and the criminal justice system must release felons or leave them to die in their cells.  Nothing works anymore.  The Courts aren’t in session except for the most necessitous cases – criminals in custody and divorces involving assault and battery and child abuse; everything else is frozen, in semi-permanent abeyance.  Retirement accounts. and with them hopes and dreams, have mostly evaporated.  Local municipalities can’t pay their obligations and there will be no tax revenue because filing dates have been deferred for another quarter.  The health care system is strained to the point of collapse – this affects not only those infected with the covid-19 virus but everyone else: who will care for the new born babies? those with merely fractured legs or arms? the scalded? those with heart attacks and strokes? the sad battalions of the mentally ill?  Doctors and nurses can’t get personal protective equipment like masks and gowns.  There aren’t enough respirators.  And, now, the doctors and nurses and the ambulance drivers and paramedics and firefighters and cops are getting sick: 10% today, how many tomorrow?

Institutions that require ongoing public support are failing?  How will the museums and concert halls survive being shuttered for three or four months – something that now seems probable?  Foreign alliances are collapsing as nations withdraw into themselves to combat the virus.  The ranks of the military are full of casualties and weakened to a point where our defense capability is in question.  The public trust has been squandered and people are suspicious, hyper-vigilant, armed to the teeth having bought out merchant inventory in side-arms and ammo from their local gun vendors.  Nothing can be built.  Construction sites languish.  Armies of people are furloughed and on unemployment.  The sane, tolerant established religions are too rational to weather this crisis – the mainstream churches have all closed and one wonders if their appeal in these desperate times is sufficient for them to be restored.  On the fringes, of course, all sorts of madness and fraud flourishes –apocalyptic cults, end-of-days preachers, merchants with scam remedies and nostrums.  Armored cars are summoned to small-town banks – the yokels are withdrawing all of the cash.  Credit card companies and lending institutions are on the brink of failure.

And, then, there are personal fears and tribulations: families forced together quarrel and explode into violence and recrimination.  Marriages fall apart.  And I wonder: how will I do when the time of trial is upon me?  Will I be a burden to others?  Will I disgrace myself with a petulant display of fear and selfishness?   What will become of me when the virus takes me in its embrace?

Ships full of corpses are denied entry into ports.  The dead are stacked in make-shift morgues.  No one can attend funerals any longer because proximity to strangers or, even, friends can be lethal.  The dead aren’t properly mourned and so they rise from unquiet graves and stalk the land.  You can see them in the distance, standing in grey, winter-ravaged cemeteries, walking in alleyways and striding along the storm-cursed horizon, gathered at night in mute dialogue under streetlights at empty intersections, huddled at the bar in dark taverns closed by the plague.

These afflictions are legion and hydra-headed and all entangled, swarming around us.

3.
When troubles come from all sides and in legions, there must be some simple remedy, one magic bullet to pierce through all problems and lay them low.  Thus, the calls for dictatorial power, centralized federal authority.  Even the most liberal pundits on the news shows are demanding the appointment of a Covid-19 Tsar – that is, a strong man, perhaps appointed by God with the divine right to order this chaos, punish malefactors, reward the virtuous and, thereby, stop this disease in its tracks.  So the liberal news media is braying for something decidedly illiberal and, I submit, of limited efficacy.  The simple truth is that no one knows how best to combat this plague – and calling some bureaucrat a “Tsar” isn’t the answer.

4.
I can’t avoid the surmise that there is something unnatural about this virus.  I know that the genetic evidence is to the contrary, but doesn’t it seem like this contagion has been tailor-made, that is, engineered by some malignant military R & D to create maximum havoc? Fifty-percent of the infected are asymptomatic and, therefore, unless tested, unaware that they are walking-talking vectors of contagion.  The virus is wonderfully robust – it can live on cardboard for a day, on stainless steel or metal surfaces for as long as three days.  It is ferociously contagious – speaking closely to someone or merely breathing on another’s face or hands can transmit the sickness, the vulgar mechanisms of sneezing or coughing aren’t even required.  And, the virus’ genius is that it only kills rarely and, then, according to arcane algorithms that no one has yet deciphered.

Military analysts and ordinance manufacturers have long known that you don’t need to kill enemy soldiers to stop an attacking army.  You need only inflict disabling and frightening wounds on some of the enemy soldiers.  If a man is blown to bits or shot dead, the attacking force will leave him as he lies.  But wounded men require succor.  Each soldier with an arm or foot shot off will remove three or possibly four of his comrades from the firing line as the injured casualty is dragged off the battlefield.  Well-designed ordinance wounds instead of kills.  And this seems to be how Covid-19 operates – instead of killing outright like Ebola, the disease simply sickens with a substantial number of its victims requiring the resources of several doctors and a half-dozen nurses as well as a huge investment in medical technology: respirators, therapeutics, PPE, negative pressure wards, ICU telemetry.

Furthermore, a really sophisticated weapon doesn’t need to kill soldiers and armies.  It merely needs to kill an enemy’s economy.


5.
The virus has seeded us.  Imagine a festive holiday, Thanksgiving or Christmas: the disease has passed and people are gathered to celebrate and, even, give thanks for their deliverance.  And, then, suddenly, one of the merrymakers falls to the ground and begins writhing and, in the throes of convulsion, his belly bursts open revealing the hideous jaws of a serpent concealed in his entrails.  Then, others fall over, frothing at the mouth, and giving birth, as it were, to a whole horde of monstrous, wriggling worms.

It’s an extravagant fantasy shamelessly derived, of course, from Ridley Scott’s Alien.

What if my nightmare scenario isn’t literally, but, rather, figuratively true?  Surely, people’s psychological response to this plague may prove to be disabling in the future.  What is the effect of this trauma, particularly on children?  What will happen to a whole generation afflicted with some species of post-traumatic stress?  In other words, what are the long-lasting psychic consequences of living with a plague of this sort?

6.
I’ve parked the car curbside to await delivery.  I’m at the Institute of Rhinoarchaeology – that is, the institute for the study of the prehistory of noses.  Before my delivery arrives, I wake up.  What were they going to bring to my car?

I have lots of time to read.  I’m completing Martin Walser’s book about Goethe’s last love, Ein Liebender Mann (“A Man in Love”).  The German is quite difficult.  I can only read five pages in an hour.  I’m working my way through Gogol.  My favorite things to read are books and papers about archaeology and art criticism.  I have Lekson’s fabulously witty and thought-provoking Chaco Meridian.   On order, I have books on the earthworks at Poverty Point and the ancient Olmecs. I also have Thomas Crew’s book on the art engendered by the restoration of monarchy in Europe after Napoleon.  I’m ambivalent about Crews’ hermeneutics and iconographic analysis – he’s far more sober than Michael Fried and Joseph Koerner, both of whom I like to read if only for their fanciful (thought-provoking if questionable) interpretations.  Jeffrey Blomster was the scholar who led a tour to the ruins in Oaxaca in which Julie and I participated.  (It was sponsored by the Archaelogical Conservancy and really wonderful).  He has made a spectacular discovery in the Oaxaca valley at a place called Etlatongo.  Excavations that he directed uncovered a ball-court – the oldest found in the Mexican highlands and, in fact, the second most ancient ball-court identified in Mesoamerica.  It is thought that the rather shadowy ball-game played universally in ancient Mexico originated in the lowlands of Chiapas around 1600 BC at the Olmec city-state at San Lorenzo.  By the time of the Aztec empire, the game seems to have been played everywhere and, apparently, possessed important ritual and political connotations.  (A variant of the game played with rubber balls exists even today).  Previously, it was thought that the game was primarily practiced in the lowlands and didn’t reach the mountainous highlands (the valley of Oaxaca) until 500 BC.  But Professor Blomster’s find, published as Origins of the Mesoamerican ballgame: Earliest ballcourt from the highlands found at Etlatongo, Oaxaca, Mexico (Science Advances, 13 March 2020) shows that the game was played in a formal court as early as 1400 BC.  This is a major discovery of great importance in understanding cultural diffusion of the ballgame and its concomitant rituals and sociology.  (One of the discoveries at Etlatongo were small ceramic figurines of ballplayers wearing the hip yoke used to buffet the ball around and diagnostic of the game.  The ballplayer figurines are hollow and have holes in them – they are also whistles.  Presumably, people watching the game blew the whistles to cheer on their side or moiety.  When I was most recently at Teotihuacan, I happened to tramp the site on a Mexican school holiday.  The place was packed with children and every one of them seemed to have a small ceramic whistle purchased from one of the vendors on which they were merrily tooting.)

7.
The Spring has reversed: ice coats everything and there is snow on the grass.  It takes me 20 minutes to chisel the ice off my windshield.

A portly crow, a distinguished gentleman of the night, ambles across the alley.  I drove toward him but he isn’t fearful.  He makes me stop for him not vice-versa.  The animals have lost their fear of the panicked humans in which they live.

8.
The great face-mask imbroglio: at his daily Rose Garden coronavirus briefing, Trump is asked whether Americans should wear face-masks when they leave the home.  This question arises from the assertion that the Covid-19 virus can be readily spread by people who are asymptomatic.  (Of course, this understanding was always implicit in the concept that people could spread the virus while asymptomatic – that is, not coughing or sneezing.)  Trump, as usual, bungles his answer: I personally won’t wear a mask, he says, but if you want to, you can wear something, maybe a scarf.  Helpfully, he adds “I think many people have scarves.”  Trump is usually dishonest, but this statement may be objectively true – even I own a few scarves.

Immediately, CNN’s Erin Burnett lunges to attack.  She accuses Trump of being negligent, indifferent to the peril, and misleading the American people.  Of course, she asserts, everyone should wear a mask when they go out in public and it is irresponsible to say that this is not mandatory.  Furthermore, Trump should be wearing a mask and, therefore, provide a good role model for his flock of American sheep.

Burnett’s remarks are total nonsense.  First, there are no mask available.  If the public were to panic and buy masks like they have purchased toilet paper, there would be no masks available for medical doctors and nurses who desperately need these things.  Second, wearing a mask that is non-medical grade creates a false sense of safety that would likely kill more people than not wearing a mask.  Julie wore a mask, commandeered from the medical facility where she works, when she took her mother to the Mayo Clinic for a biopsy earlier this week (I am writing on April 4, 2020).  She said that the mask was ill-fitting and she spent much time fingering her cheeks and jaws to adjust the covering over her face.  In other words, when you wear a poorly fitting non-medical grade mask, you necessarily touch your face a lot – something we’ve been told not to do.  And, incidentally, Ms. Burnett is not wearing a mask as a TV role model, nor is Anderson Cooper nor Wolf Blitzer nor Dr. Sanjay Gupta.  Its redolent of hurricane coverage in which the newscasters solemnly warn everyone to shelter-in-place while their reporters (with their sound men and camera crews) are filmed outside enjoying the full brunt of the storm. If wearing a mask were mandatory, I would certainly be happy to accept my news coverage from the glamor boys and girls on TV with their expensive mugs half-draped in cloth or plastic, but they are having none of that themselves.

Burnett summons on-air poor Sanjay Gupta, who seems to be a reasonable man.  In the last few days, Gupta seems to be afflicted by some kind of dental problem or canker-sore, the poor guy’s mouth is twitching and he seems to be exploring a sore spot (or spots) with his tongue within his cheek or gums.  Burnett really only has one demand: say something really bad about President Trump.  She isn’t interested in anything else.  So she spits a few questions in the direction of the handsome medic, all soft balls that he is supposed to hit out of the park with invective against Trump.  Gupta won’t play ball.  He notes that the WHO and CDC both aren’t convinced that wearing masks will do anything beneficial.  Like Trump, he observes that if the masks fit right, there’s probably no harm in wearing them, but they shouldn’t be assumed to be protecting anyone.  He repeats the fundamental message – stay six feet away from other people when you are in public.  Burnett, then, asks him whether its evil and irresponsible for Trump to not wear a mask.  Dr. Gupta replies that Trump has twice been tested, as recently as yesterday, and that he is negative for the virus – he’s not infected.  So, Gupta says, there is no rational reason for him to wear a mask.  This never occurred to Erin Burnett and she doesn’t have a rejoinder.  She glares at the poor doc with rage and, then, sullenly pouts.

9.
I made a non-medical grade mask for myself.  I took a plastic Walmart shopping bag, ripped out a hole to fit around my glasses and put the thing over my head.  Julie took some cell-phone pictures of me watching TV in my simple non-medical grade mask.   Then, we posted those pictures on e-bay offering the masks for sale for $5.95 (plus $3.95 for shipping).  We made a quick thousand dollars but, then, ran out of leftover plastic bags.  (I save and use them as “poop bags” when I walk my dog.)

There are fortunes to be made out of this virus.

10.
Trump says that many Americans will die.  He lacks even the most elementary eloquence and adopts a nonchalant tone that many will perceive as indifference – in his inept way, he is trying to show a “stiff upper lip”, that is, fortitude in the face of adversity but he doesn’t have the resources to pull it off.  He also says that the statistics show that there is “light at the end of the tunnel.”

After the press conference, the media pounce, once again hysterically accusing the president of “mixed messaging.”  But this is again willful misunderstanding: what he means, but can’t effectively say, is that the carnage this week will, perhaps, be the apex of viral impact, and, after the massacre, things will slowly begin to improve.  In fact, Trump calls Anthony Fauci to the podium to make this precise point.  But no one reports Fauci’s words and again Trump is accused of misleading the public.  I’m not misled.  The message is mixed; this is because the report is a compound of the horrific and faintly optimistic – after all, this too shall pass.

11.
One positive effect of the coronavirus, I hope, will be the destruction of the bloated and viciously inauthentic professional sports industry in this country.  If the virus had surfaced in January – which it did – no one would have canceled the NFL play-offs or the Super Bowl; some franchises are too big to fail.

Professional sports is an persistent font of false values, a taint on the nation.  But, mark my words, the virus will receded sufficiently for the NFL to begin its season this Fall.

12.
My dreams show that I am losing my mind.

I’m at a trial in the Rice County Courthouse in Faribault.  My son, Martin, is accused of violating the Governor’s Order, although this Order has nothing to do with the coronavirus – it’s something about conservation in the North Woods.  Although Martin is trying the case on his own, pro se, I am seated at the counsel table as the proceedings drone on, helplessly fumbling through stacks of paper.

At a recess, I suggest to Martin that he sit at counsel table.  He intends to call several witnesses, but doesn’t have them under subpoena and, so, I know they won’t appear.  I think the Court is in-session again but I can’t find the court room – it’s tucked into a little, discreet alcove near the front door.  The Courthouse is crammed with people, everyone standing well within the six feet social distancing cordon sanitaire that prudence and the Governor’s Order requires.  Public TV is conducting a carnival in front of the windows behind which the clerks of court are working.  I push my way through the crowded corridors but I have no idea where the courtroom is located.  Perhaps, the proceedings are underway – within this chaos, I suppose, there are secret patterns meaningful to the Judge, but I can’t see them, have no control over what is happening, and don’t understand anything.

13.
Tuesday, two days after Trump’s Sunday press conference, the morning media breathlessly announces that another several hundred people have died in New York City, killed by the contagion now reaching its “apex”, but that the “curve is flattening”, the number of new cases leveling off or, even, reversing and there is, indeed, light at the end of the tunnel.  This is exactly what Trump said 48 hours earlier for which he was derided for “mixed messaging” – you can’t have it both ways, lots of deaths and some cautious optimism, the news commentators told us.  But this is exactly the situation.

14.
The plague has been a boon to dogs.  It’s socially acceptable to walk your dog, while it may be problematic to go outside otherwise.  I always walk my dog, Frieda, rain or shine, and, so, our habits haven’t changed.  But, now, the streets are full of happy dogs, romping at the end of their leashes, both big and small, puppies dancing on the sidewalk and old dogs placidly padding along.  When I get home, I find a black speck on Frieda’s nose and, when I stoop to brush it away, the little particle suddenly levitates and flies away: the first mosquito of the season.

Will the blood of people contaminated with corona-virus be contagious and can this illness be spread by mosquito bites like the West Nile disease?  This is not a trivial question in soggy Minnesota – even now, billions of larvae are writhing in puddles and lagoons of melt-water spilled into the fields and soon the air will be singing with them.

15.
There is no death sadder than the soldier killed after the battle has been decisively won or lost or the man struck down on the eve of armistice.

16.
Politicians say that the public response to the virus, for the most part, has been heroic.  People have stayed home and not congregated in groups that would further the spread of the disease.  Staying at home is said to be patriotic in this present conflict, the moral equivalent of war.

Of course, some have remarked that our grandfathers were ordered to leave families and home, undergo arduous training, and, then, kill our enemies or be killed by them.  We are being told to sit on our couches and watch TV.

17.
Thunder before dawn and one burst of lightning.  Then, rain magically falling from a naked blue sky.  Later, clouds bury the town.  In the distance, a strange, electric humming like some vast generator.  Mosquitos are being manufactured or filtrable virons.

18.
There’s no where to go with this story, essentially a narrative about statistics, a subject that most Americans can’t fathom.  The news shows depict doctors and nurses dressed in hulking protective gear hovering over reddish patients whose faces are blurred-out by a camera-effect.  Some numbers are announced by a newscaster and, then, a governor appears to plead for respirators and masks.  Another official promises respirators and masks.  A freakishly young victim of the virus is shown in photographs taken when he or she was healthy – now, this person is dead.  (In fact, in Minnesota the mean age for a person killed by the virus is 86).  Family members are allowed to mourn on air for 15 to 20 seconds.  Then, a nurse with her mask tipped down over her throat says that she feels like a “lamb going to the slaughter” every time that she goes into the ward full of gasping and dying Covid-19 0002 patients.  Her anger is purely expressive – she doesn’t suggest anything to improve her plight.  Probably, there is nothing that can be done.

Someone who wishes to salute the nurses and doctors for their brave duty calls them “rock stars.”  That’s a jarring thing to hear: “rock star” is another way of saying someone is ignorant, narcissistic, lacking in any real talent, depraved, and selfish.  This form of praise need to be re-thunk.

19.
He was a mail carrier who lived in Chicago and wrote songs on the side.  Performing at a folk music place in Old Town, John Prine impressed Roger Ebert.  Ebert, who worked as a newspaper critic, wrote a favorable review for the young man and he became modestly famous.  Bob Dylan also praised Prine saying that he embodied “Midwestern Proustian Existentialism”, a phrase that just goes to show that Dylan (at least at that time) knew nothing about Proust or existentialism.

I know John Prine’s music chiefly because my step-daughter, Sena Ehrhardt, performed a wonderful version of “Angel from Montgomery”.  This ballad was one of Prine’s most famous songs, and, also, one of his first great successes – it appears on his first album issued in 1971.  Prine was a great lyricist: “If dreams were thunder/and lightning was desire/This old house would’ve burned down/A long time ago.”

The covid virus killed Prine on April 7, 2020.

20.
The sky is turbulent with big snow clouds like fists gloved in icy black.  The wind is cold and, in the country, the traffic signs flex and quiver with its blows.  The snow spears down, angling into the green grass on the gale.  After a few hours, the sun appears hesitantly between towers of boiling cloud and the snow evaporates but the winds remain fierce and icy.  This is the day before Good Friday.

21.
Trump wanted all the churches open and jubilant on Easter.  This isn’t going to happen.

22.
Walmart is a barometer for the pressure in the community.  By the look of things, the town is about to explode.

The front door on the grocery side is blocked by a sort of corral made from cardboard shipping boxes and orange cones.  A guy wearing a florescent green vest stands in the corner of the corral and directs you away from the exit door.  Generally, at this particular Walmart, people don’t pay much attention to which door is marked exit and which entrance.  Like the girl in Prince’s “Raspberry Beret”, people often “go in through the out door.”  Apparently, the management of Walmart thinks that this forces people into proximity dangerously close and, so, now a separation between the doors is religiously observed and the worker in the vest barks if your path takes you toward the wrong entry.  He’s a very laid-back dude, obviously, otherwise the fraught customers, who have poor impulse control generally, would draw their conceal-and-carry firearms and gun him down.

Inside, the store has more tape marks on the floor than the sound-stage of a live audience sit-com.  The marks direct you where to stand and wait.  Everyone is supposed to maintain six foot distance while in the grocery.  At first, I don’t notice the strips of tape on the floor.  I have come into the place with Angelica to buy only a very few items, a handful of staples, and plan to use the self-serve kiosks to check-out.  That area of the store is manned by a fearless Hispanic kid who thinks he’s immortal and, probably, for all practical purposes, is pretty much indestructible.  There’s a line waiting for the check-out machines and, inadvertently, I crowd the woman ahead of me – the tape on the floor is scuffed and I have stepped over it.  The woman whirls to face me with a look of utter horror and rage.  I see that her cart is full of bleach products and paper towels, instruments for scrubbing and cleansing.  Her lip is contorted and her eyes, fixed in her narrow small head, have something of the glint of a praying mantis or wasp.  I don’t want to be stung and so I step back a pace or two, taking my place behind the tape on the tile floor.

This is why I despise Walmart.  It’s a temple to egalitarianism.  The working poor think that they have every right not to be contaminated by me.  They should be happy to receive the gift of my germs.  There’s a structure to society and these people don’t know their place.

Of course, I recognize that these thoughts are wrong and, certainly, despicable.  I step back and don’t crowd the lady with her pathetic stores of cleaning materials.  She’s right and I’m wrong.  But it doesn’t feel like that to me.

Probably, I should avoid the place at all costs.  At Walmart, I’m too much revealed to myself.

23.
The dreams are worse.

Two swarthy men wearing heavy coats and scarves are threatening another man that I used to know.  (This man was one of the founding members of the Great Books group but has since gone to Minneapolis – we say “gone to Minneapolis” with the reverence that we might say “gone to heaven.)
For some reason, I intervene and the two thugs begin to threaten me, even reaching out to cuff my ear and chin.  There’s nothing to do but pretend to be asleep and so I close my eyes and snuggle with the smaller of the two thugs and I hear his breathing calm as the rage leaves his body and, then, he is asleep.  I drowse for awhile, the warm weight of the sleeping hoodlum, next to me.

Then, I recognize it’s time to flee.  I get up and quickly walk away from the figures huddled in the corner of some kind of big open room.  It’s dark outside and I’m terribly hungry.  On a kind of loading dock elevated above the gloomy street, I find a McDonald’s except that it’s not a McDonald’s but really more like a soup kitchen with three sides of the structure bare concrete block walls and the fourth  an open counter where men in uniforms are working amidst hot grills and steam.  I’m wearing a suit and, before I approach the counter where some customers are waiting, I try to tuck my shirt into my pants.  For some reason, my hands are numb and inept and I can’t get the dress shirt tucked in properly.  I also discover my trousers are unzipped, although this is something that I learn only after I have placed an order and stepped back away from the counter, trying to “social distance” from the grimy, shadowy people also waiting for their food.

Then, I go back to the counter to pay for my burgers.  I take out my wallet because I know that I am carrying several twenty dollar bills in the currency sleeve.  But, for some reason, I can’t make the payment.  The place where bills are kept in my wallet is full of business cards, dry-cleaning receipts, opera and movie tickets, and, even, foreign currency, by the look of it Icelandic Kroner.  I keep pulling things out and setting them on the counter, but the paper that I present for payment is useless – heaps of parking lot tickets, cards from competitor layers, random scraps of paper.  The counter man becomes increasingly impatient.  “Dude, put your house in order,” he says.  I can’t find the currency.  I can’t find any cash at all; everything in my wallet has turned to junk.  Then, I remember that I stuffed one of the twenties into my breast pocket.  I reach there only to discover that I’ve put a hamburger in that pocket and my fingers come out with ketchup on them.  ‘Dude?” the counter man says.  Then, I recall that I put my cash into my pants pocket.  I look down and see that my zipper is open and my shirt isn’t tucked in properly.  I reach into my pants pocket.  There’s another hamburger crammed into that pocket and, again, my finger comes out dripping red with ketchup.

24.
The investment account, a report made to me monthly, shows that since the onset of the coronavirus, I have lost $200,000.  Easy come, easy go.  But old men are miserly by nature.

25.
Around three in the morning, when the nightmare wakes me, I see that a big pink-yellow eye is glaring through my window, looking down full in my face.  It’s the full moon but with a strange tint.  I put on my glasses and the glowing orb shrinks to a round, hot-looking slightly colored hole in the night sky.  People used to think that sleeping with your face under the full moon caused madness – hence, the word “lunacy”.  My dreams suggest that I am losing my mind.

26.
Most of the people are wearing home-made masks the grocery store. All of the older men reek of booze.  They are the exceptions to the rule that the shoppers wear masks.  The drunks lurch around amid the aisles of brightly packaged food.  The toilets are near the check-out stations and the middle-aged drunks vanish behind closed doors and, then, stagger out to glower at the people buying food.

27.
Ten days ago, the mainstream media were united that Trump should seize control of the means of production, nationalize manufacture of personal protective gear, respirators, and medication, and impose a shelter-in-place order applicable to all fifty states.  Citing the Constitution, Trump declined to assert these powers.  Yesterday (April 13), Trump conducts a press conference and asserts dictatorial (his term is “absolute”) power over the States.  But his intent seems to be to require States to abrogate their stay-at-home orders and put people back to work to revive the comatose economy.  The media is now furious and complains that the President is violating the Constitution.  The level of childish hypocrisy on both sides is almost beyond belief.

28.
A man has come from Savannah, Georgia.  He announces that the golf courses in that area remain open.  Of course, it’s a little different now.  The players ride one to a cart and the carts are first sprayed with a mixture of bleach and water before being provided and, every hour, a kid comes along with a bucket in his own Cushman and swabs down the pin and flag.  Pencils coming with score-cards are also dipped in a disinfectant chlorine solution.  Everything smells like a big indoor swimming pool even though you are outside.

After the game, the golfers sit in the bar, each at a separate round table, toasting one another, guffawing, teasing.  But these are old men and many of them can’t hear very well and, so, there is continuous misunderstanding.

29.
A Spring blizzard fills the air with snow for ten hours beginning on Easter morning.  Everything is covered in thick, heavy blankets of wet snow.  The trees slump as if with despair and the roadways are cut into grooves filled with slush.  It doesn’t seem worth risking cardiac arrest to shovel this snow off driveways and sidewalks, although people with snow-blowers needs to justify their investment and so, the morning after the snowstorm, the crisp, cold air is roaring with their sound.

30.
A fist-sized blue woodpecker hammers at the tree on my boulevard.  Snow sifts down.  Perhaps, the tree is infested with emerald ash borer larvae.  That arboreal contagion has now been identified in Minnesota.  The woodpecker is a pretty creature.  Would that all symptoms of infection were so beautifully bright and sartorially elegant.

30.
An old woman down the street dies.  The true toll of the coronavirus is unknown.  Lots of old people have simply died at home.  The old man’s wife says that he thought his wife was dead for almost a week.  She was inert, barely breathing, completely unresponsive.  Without food or water, it was only a matter of time.  She slipped away without waking or, even, moving so much as her little finger.

31.
When I left my home to walk my dog, the sun was bright, light blowing through burly, dark clouds scudding across the sky.  But, after ten blocks, at my place to turn around, the clouds had coalesced and there was no sun breaking through between them and, then, the first flecks of snow began to flicker in the air.  In its groove, the engorged river flowed under bridges, a brown tense sinew flexing itself under the flakes of snow melting on its surface.  A shopping bag was impaled on a tree standing next to some residential housing built a decade ago for the elderly.  The wind made the bag pierced by the tree shudder and twitch.

There’s something exhilarating about the sweep of the wind, whirling flakes horizontally, and the middle distance loses focus and blurs to white and, at the ends of the streets, the clouds have settled onto the earth and froth with snow.  Old Man Winter is ingenious and persistent and, at least, for an hour, he’s returned with snow and wind.  I have something of the wild feeling that still stirs in my heart when the first flakes of Winter come suddenly on a stormy day in autumn presaging the season of cold.  It’s as if a hiker climbing between wooded moraines in the high mountains were to watch the warm sun become suddenly diffuse and wan, and, then, the scent of pine sap and juniper berries exhaled from the forest is, suddenly, chilled out of the air and, although the stream beds are mostly dry stone in September (the snow on the peaks almost gone by this month) and the creeks reduced to rivulets dancing boulder to boulder, the air is suddenly full of white flying pennants of snow, soft flakes that catch on the tree trunks and whiten them and the trail to the heights also becomes pale and you have the sense that the season is suddenly rolling over like a vast pale leviathan in the deepest abyss in the sea...

April 14,2020 

On an Infuriating Novel

For some reason, I didn’t take German as a ninth-grader in High School.  All the college-bound kids were enrolled, but I wasn’t.  In fact, I think I may have elected Industrial Arts or Shop as it was, then, called.  Needless to say, I was completely inept in Industrial Arts, terrified of the machinery, menacing blades and planing devices designed to flay the skin from your arms and hands, and, so, maladroit that I couldn’t cut a board in two or suture wood together to save my soul.  I don’t know what I was trying to prove and so, I think, I enrolled in a second year of industrial arts.  Finally, before my junior year in High School, a kindly counselor, after looking at my aptitude scores, insisted that I take a Freshman level German course – by this time, I was in 11th grade and like an old, perverse uncle to the younger boys and girls in the class-room.  I had a gift for language and, of course, I excelled in German.  I learned the language easily, at least, at the High School level, and enjoyed the class work, even, excelled at pronunciation and imitating the language’s prosody.  I took another year of German when I was a senior and, then, at the University of Minnesota, continued my studies.  Everything went well, so well, indeed, that in my Junior year at the U, a German professor suggested that I enroll in a several month-long course conducted in Berlin.  I was tempted but my father wanted me to become a lawyer and, in any event, I didn’t have the money and couldn’t expect that my parents would finance such a frivolous excursion.  So I turned down the proposal, continued reading German, but never learned to speak the language.  I was so dull-witted at that time that I took a perverse pride in not being able to speak German.  The spoken word was a kind of athletic endeavor, competitive even, and I had no time for sport – I had taught myself to read with some proficiency, but couldn’t utter more than a phrase or so. 

The way that I learned German was private, even a bit secretive.  At the University of Minnesota, in those days, Winter break lasted from the first few days of December until the second week in January – there was a hiatus in classroom learning for about six weeks.  During my second year at the University, I rode to campus every day with my father – he worked at Honeywell about two miles north of the school and could let me out of his car each morning around 7:45 near campus.  I walked across the long bridge over the Mississippi, installed myself in the reading room of the Wilson Library, thirty feet or so from the six or seven aisles of German books.  I think I began by reading Kafka, sitting for hours in a carrel with my German dictionary at hand.  When I tired, I would find an art book and page through the pictures or go outside and walk around the West Bank campus.  Following this routine for six weeks, I taught myself how to read literary German.  It was a happy experience for me, something that I enjoyed doing and for which I had a certain aptitude.

During law school, I worked at a motel and rode a bus, sometimes for two to three hours a day depending upon traffic.  On the bus, I read Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg – this took me about a year.  I also read Gunter Grass’ Der Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) and Hundejahre (Dog Years).  (I have read Grass for most of my life – in the last decade I read his memoir Haeuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), Krebsgaenge (Crabwalk) and the second volume of his memoirs Grimms Woerter (Grimm’s Words), this latter book a particular favorite.)  During the first five or six years practicing law in Austin, I was busy learning my craft and didn’t have much time to read in German.  Now, at the end of my law career, I try to read German about five or six days a week if possible, if only four or five pages at a time.

It’s frustrating to make this admission but more than 45 years study of German hasn’t amounted to anything like mastery of the language.  I’ve traveled to German-speaking countries three times, but still would never dare attempt a conversation in that language.  In fact, spoken German continues to baffle me.  And, furthermore, I’m not sure that I have made much progress in reading the language since those long bus-rides during which I pored over Mann’s elaborate sentences or Grass’ surrealistic, and, therefore, often impenetrable prose.  Today, when I read a novel, I generally have to look up one or two words every three pages.  It’s irritating, as well, that the words that force me to the dictionary are generally expressions on which I have previously consulted the dictionary, attempted to commit to memory and promptly forgotten again.  When I read German poetry, the syntax often eludes me and, when checking my translation with an English version, I often find that I reversed the meaning – something is not doing something to something else, rather the something is, itself, being acted upon.  Colloquial idioms often defeat me, although not always – modern German is heavily indebted to English and has adopted many expressions in idiomatic English in equivalent forms in German.  The most frustrating aspect of the language is its agglutinative character –German forms longer, more complex, words from shorter, simpler, and more concrete terms.  A good example, I am ashamed to admit, are the constellation of words grouped around the German verb geben (“to give”) – a reader will frequently encounter formations derived from the phrase such as eingeben, begeben, vergeben, and most annoying ergeben. The first three verbs mean something like “to enter” (“in-give”?), betake oneself (“be-give”?), and “to award” (“to give with particular emphasis” – this, I think I can see).  Ergeben is generally translated as “to result” although the word literally means something like  to “to give decisively, even, fatally”.  In Martin Walser’s novel about Goethe’s last love Ein Liebenden Mann (A Man in Love), the old poet obsesses over the way that his teenage girlfriend signs her letters: she writes Ihre ergebene Freundin, Ulrike – this means “Your (formal) devoted (female) friend, Ulrike”.  So how is it that ergeben which means “to result” here has the meaning, in adjective form, “devoted”?  As you will see, these definitions can’t necessarily be established by tacking the typical meaning of the prefix on the verb form geben (“to give”).  The really irritating fact about the word ergebene (the adjective form of ergeben) is that I have probably looked-up this word one-hundred times or more and, yet, I can’t ever remember what it means.  I know that an Ergebnis is  “result”, but my mind is too logical (logic is very bad thing in the study of languages) to figure out that ergebene is just a polite formula in the early 19th century for “devoted” – something like “your humble servant.”

All of this is preface to the admission that it has taken me the better part of five months to read, albeit with lengthy periods of respite from the damned thing, Walser’s Ein Liebenden Mann (hereinafter ELM).  The book is only 281 pages long, but the prose is difficult and, except for the Covid-19 virus, which has authorized me to read an hour or so at work, my guess is that it would have taken me even longer but for this current health crisis.  And the unfortunate thing is that I have now concluded, pretty much irrevocably, that the book wasn’t worth the effort.  Since failure is as interesting as success – and, in some ways, even more instructive, I will amplify on my distaste for the novel. 

Walser is an old man and still alive as far as I know.  He has won every reward possible in the German-speaking world, many instances of literary prizes vergeben.  Born in 1927, Walser now lives on Lake Constance, the location where his most famous work, the novella Ein Fliehende Pferd (A Runaway Horse – I’ll call this Horse) is set.  Horse, was published to vast acclaim in 1978, and its so famous now that it merits a Suhrkampf Verlag Basis-Bibliothek volume – this means that the text is taught in literature classes in German High Schools and Colleges.   

Horse is about 100 pages long, an account of a mid-life crisis suffered by its hero, Helmut.  I read the book in the Basis Bibliothek text annotated for bright German literature students functioning at about a Junior College level.  (Basis Bibliothek editions are peculiar.  The notes pedantically annotate a casual reference to Napoleon with his date of birth, principal accomplishments, including a chronology of battles and wives.  A page later some bizarre reference to alchemy phrased in an exotic local dialect will occur without any note at all.  A particularly annoying feature of these books for an English reader is that every American idiom that appears is provided with a detailed Teutonically-complete philological explanation – the exact thing that I don’t need to assist me in interpreting the text.  Based on my experiences in Germany, where most people use English better and with more nuance than American native speakers, it’s hard for me to believe that Germanistik students in that country really need to be told what phrases like “hot dog” mean.)  In the novella, Helmut, who is a school-teacher, with his wife, Sabine, are enjoying a holiday in a house on the Bodensee (Lake Constance).  I use the word “enjoy” advisedly because Helmut is anhedonic, someone who finds ways to make his life complicated and unhappy.  Sexual relations with his wife have deteriorated to next to nothing and he spends his afternoons morosely reading Kierkegaard.  (His wife, who is longing for a little more spice in her life, reads Richard Wagner’s diaries.)  The couple encounter the obnoxious Klaus Buch and his much younger trophy wife, Helene.  Klaus was once Helmut’s school-chum and seems to genuinely admire his old playmate’s intellect and eccentricity.  But he shows his affection by challenging poor, introverted Helmut to increasingly dangerous and problematic feats of boldness, exhorting him to adventures for which he is ill-suited.  Helmut and Sabine dislike the couple at first, but, later, find themselves increasingly obsessed with them – predictably Helmut is entranced by the beautiful, free-spirited Helene and Klaus seems to be making a play for Sabine.

Klaus recounts in embarrassing detail some memories of mutual masturbation involving the boys at their school.  (German adolescents, apparently, have some pretty depraved habits with respect to jerking-off.)  He boasts loudly and often about sex with Helene and asks poor Helmut about his conjugal relations – not a good topic for the reserved and sexually dysfunctional school teacher.  In some respects, the sexual elements of the book, all surprisingly graphic, resemble Philip Roth on a bad day.  While hiking in the country, the two couples encounter a runaway horse.  Implausibly, and with great aplomb, Klaus subdues the horse and, even, rides it – by contrast, Helmut is terrified.  Everything seems to be building toward a calamitous experiment in wife-swapping, although the story, ultimately, doesn’t progress to that point.  Instead, the two men go for a sail on the big lake on Klaus’ catamaran.  A sudden squall sweeps over the big lake and Klaus is pitched overboard.  The reader is happy to see the manic and obnoxious character disposed-of in this fashion.  Unfortunately, Klaus has somehow survived and he re-appears as husband and wife are consoling poor distraught Helene, a scene also with distinct sexual overtones.  The two couples go their separate way and Helmut is reinvigorated – if I recall correctly, the book ends with him having sex with his wife. 

Walser is a fine prose stylist, although he writes in a fussy manner with elaborate and extravagant metaphors.  The novella is somewhat over-written after the German manner – every detail is oriented toward some meaning and the whole enterprise is given mythic overtones; it’s a bit like a petite bourgeois heterosexual version of Death in Venice, although the story also has some resemblance to the demise of the German professor in von Sternberg’s Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) – in that tale, based upon the novel Professor Unrat by Thomas Mann’s brother, Heinrich, a school teacher is subjected to sado-masochistic abuse on the vaudeville stage as a consequence of his ill-fated mid-life crisis and, literally, dies of humiliation.  By contrast, Walser’s tone is cool, sardonic, and amoral.  Yet, the story dramatizes a characteristically German theme: one step off the straight and narrow dooms you irrevocably.

Horse was published in 1978 when Walser was about 50 and the book, possibly, carries some autobiographical meaning, although this is pure surmise on my part.  Ein Liebender Mann (ELM) appeared when Walser was 81.  (He is 93 today).  The two books are related: Horse is about a mid-life crisis with sexual implications; ELM chronicles a geriatric crisis, also romantic in nature. 

ELM is insanely ambitious.  The novel is about twice the length of Horse but it feels much, much longer.  In ELM, Walser narrates the story of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s last great love, the poet’s doomed obsession with the 17 year old Ulrike von Levetzow.  At the time that he encountered the teenage girl, Goethe was 72 and a world-famous figure.  The novel tells us that he had met Napoleon three times, an ironic detail since Ulrike’s father was killed fighting Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo.  The story takes place over an eighteen month period, ending apparently in the Spring of 1824.  Goethe’s infatuation with the young woman is well-known, a historical fact, and Walser is treading on sacred ground in his fictional account of the abortive romance. 

Germans are taught the sequence of Goethe’s love affairs in High School.  This is because the great poet and thinker possessed the sort of creative imagination that required that his work be dedicated to some female muse.  In this respect, Goethe is similar to Picasso – students chart his inspiration on the basis of the women that he embraced (or wished to embrace).  Therefore, every high-school educated German will be familiar to some extent with the great man’s dalliance with the spirited and beautiful Ulrike. Furthermore, Goethe is a figure whose pre-eminence in German culture can’t be overstated –he is the cultured German as cosmopolitan citizen of the world par excellence and his aphorisms condense the way that the people who speak that language view the world.  (The only figure comparable in English is Shakespeare, but that writer is a bit remote from our world, and we view him with more detachment than German’s bring to Goethe – furthermore, Goethe is a cultural hero to the Germans not only with respect to literature but, also, in fields relating to engineering and the natural sciences, particularly botany and geology (although he was also once known throughout the world for his Farben Lehre – that is, his ostensibly scientific, if now discredited, studies in optics).  For Germans, Goethe is like Shakespeare with the scientific prestige of Sir Isaac Newton.)

Walser’s tinkering with Goethe’s biography is not unprecedented in German literature.  There is a fine if melancholy book by Eduard Morike called Mozart on the Way to Prague.  Morike is a great poet and his novella is a sweet, inconsequential account of Mozart and his wife traveling to Prague where the composer will direct the world-premiere of his opera The Magic Flute.  Mozart didn’t have much time to live and the gentle romance, presented by Morike with rococo delicacy, is shadowed by the imminence of the great composer’s death – indeed, the novella ends with one of the very greatest lyric poems presaging death in German (or any other language for that matter).  Thomas Mann, the most ambitious writer in German literature, fictionalizes one of Goethe’s most famous romances, in Lotte in Weimar.  This novel recounts Goethe’s romance with Charlotte Buff (another lady whose name German Gymnasium students are required to memorize.)  Charlotte was the original for Lotte the heroine in Goethe’s famous novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (incidentally, Napoleon’s favorite book).  Mann’s novel, which bears the subtitle, “The Beloved Returns” involves Charlotte’s return to Weimar in Goethe’s old age.

Furthermore, Ulrike’s flirtation with Goethe resulted in a literary monument, the aged poet’s Trilogie der Leidenschaft (“Trilogy of Passion”), three late poems dedicated to the young woman, including the majestic “Marienbad Elegy”.  These are among Goethe’s most celebrated verses and Walser’s book includes the Elegy in its complete form together with an account as to how the poem was written.  Further, Walser even imitates the famous writer’s prose-style.  About a third of the book consists of letters ostensibly written by Goethe to Ulrike.  Walser had free rein composing these letters.  Ulrike, who never married, kept Goethe’s correspondence until her death in November 1899.  Walser reports that before the old woman died, she had the letters ceremoniously cremated with the ash deposited in a silver casket that was placed beside her body when her coffin was closed for the last time.  No one knows the exact content of those letters and so Walser has latitude to invent pages and pages of prose that he ascribes to Goethe.  This demonstrates audacity on the part of Walser that verges on megalomania.  At the very least, Walser’s temerity shows a high-degree of arrogance – but he is a writer who has won every prize that you can attain for achievements in German literature; indeed, the man has even written film scripts.

ELM begins with Goethe taking the waters at Marienbad.  He is lodging at an Inn called “The Golden Grape” near where the Levetzow family, a wealthy widow and her three daughters, have taken rooms.  At Marienbad, everyone strolls along a promenade sipping from glasses of mineral water.  The objective is ceremonial, an upper class ritual of seeing and being seen.  As it happens, he teenaged Ulrike sees Goethe and catches his eye before he has noticed her.  This is characteristic – in the flirtation that follows, Ulrike seems to be the aggressor. 

At first, the novel proceeds in a sprightly manner.  Ulrike is portrayed as the kind of character that the young Katherine Hepburn played in screwball comedies made in the thirties.  She’s beautiful, witty and high-spirited.  When Goethe deploys some of his trademark aphorisms on her, she notes that these are sentences that are amphibolous – they mean, more or less, the same thing if you invert them.  She even draws a clever distinction between how the words sound and what they really mean – klingt (sound) versus ist (is – that is “to be”).  Goethe observes that her eyes defeat his Farbenlehre (theory of light and colors) – they seem to change color from hour to hour.  Goethe and young woman become inseparable.  All of Europe’s greatest families, and gossips, see them strolling together on the Marienbad promenade.  Ottilie von Goethe, the old poet’s daughter-in-law, and his chief nemesis in the book, warns him that the entanglement will result in misery and that he is making a fool of himself.

The course of true love doesn’t run true.  Goethe’s courtship of Ulrike is complicated by the appearance of a smarmy jewel-merchant, Herr de Ror.  This man affects Byronic airs – he’s swarthy, either a Greek or Turk.  De Ror is interested in Ulrike and a man of action, not a dreamy Denker.  When someone tries to “cut in” on Ulrike on the dance-floor, he knocks the interloper to the ground.  Ulrike seems to interested in de Ror, who is without a first name; he has announced that he will disclose his first name only to the woman that he marries.  He spends an evening with Ulrike, probably at the behest of the girl’s scheming mother – she is aiming to make good marriages for all of her daughters.  Goethe is madly jealous of de Ror and spends the greater part of the next 30 pages raging against his rival and considering suicide.  He even strips down and inspects himself naked, a scene in which Walser indulges himself in contemplating Goethe’s penis.  (Ten years earlier, an admirer of Goethe described his form as like a figure of Zeus carved from Parian marble – he is apparently fantastically beautiful even as an old man.)   Goethe considers himself old-fashioned.  He is “rococo” and not a Romantic figure (in the literary sense) like the Byronic de Ror.  Always highly self-centered, Goethe equates his love for Ulrike with his obstinacy in defending his anti-Newtonian optics – despite all evidence to the contrary, he will not abandon his passion.  Appearances to the contrary, Ulrike disdains de Ror and tells Goethe she isn’t interested in the jewel merchant.  The two of them invent a name for him: Velocifer, a portmanteau word that means Lucifer acting swiftly, that is with “velocity.” 

The highlight of the Marienbad social season is a costume ball.  After agonizing as to what he will wear, Goethe attends the dance dressed as Werther, the hero of the novel that made him an international sensation almost fifty years earlier. (The novel was such a literary sensation that Mary Shelley portrays Frankenstein’s monster reading The Sorrows of Young Werther.)  Ulrike appears at the ball dressed as Lotte, Werther’s beloved.  Goethe is astonished – he and Ulrike did not discuss their costumes with one another and the poet believes that their garb at the dance demonstrates an uncanny affinity.  Nonetheless, all doesn’t go well.  Goethe stumbles and falls at the costume ball and gashes his forehead badly.  He lacerates his temple at exactly the location where his first novel describes the self-inflicted bullet-wound that killed Werther.  After the costume ball, Goethe proposes marriage to Ulrike through an intermediary.  He receives an equivocal response that he interprets as composed by Ulrike’s mother. 

The gay convalescents at Marienbad, then, travel to Karlsbad in Bohemia for another round of therapy augmented by the medicinal spring water there.  At Karlsbad, Goethe and Ulrike attend a concert.  Goethe finds most music distasteful but he discovers that he can enjoy concerts by watching Ulrike’s obvious delight in the performance.  He becomes increasingly obsessed with the young woman.  The novel’s prose heats up:

(Considering that he has been missing some intangible something all his life, Goethe thinks:) Love.  Now it is here.  There is such a thing.  Love isn’t just a game with words.  It is the most extreme certainty possible.  It is the thing most remarkably at hand.  That which fills you up.  The greatest security...He surrendered to Ulrike’s nonchalant objectivity.  Is captured by it.  The conclusion is: He can dispense with everything in the world, but not her.  He is nothing more than his love for her.  A declaration of love: When hats are at issue.  When one sees women with ostentatious hats, in his mind he tests those hats with Ulrike.  Every one of those hats, even the most outrageous, is only lovely when Ulrike wears it.  The German is ambiguous – love is a word with feminine gender; thus there is a question in several of these declarations as to whether Goethe is thinking about Ulrike in this stream-of-conscience or “love” itself as an abstract concept.  Of course, Walser’s point is that it doesn’t matter – Ulrike has come to embody the entire concept of love for the old man. 

At Karlbad, Goethe hikes with Ulrike through the woods to a hut dedicated to the virgin huntress Diana.  This excursion will mark the apex of his relationship with the girl.  Walser provides all the romantic accoutrement in this episode – it even rains and the couple get soaking wet.  Goethe puts his lips in close proximity to Ulrike, but their lips don’t touch. The forest and the scenic path will be the subject of memories both tender and tormenting in last third of the book.  Ulrike describes the woods as the Du-zone – that is, the terrain where the lovers address one another with the word “thou.”  In early September 1823, Goethe departs Karlsbad for his home at Weimar.  The family Levetzow leave for their residence in Stuttgart.   

This summary describes the first 181 pages of the novel.  So far so good – although I don’t ordinarily like lengthy accounts of love affairs, the book has been tolerably interesting and perceptively written.  Ulrike is not too insufferable as a character.  Goethe is obviously flawed and self-deceiving, but he also is fairly engaging.  The portrait of the spas and their habitues is well-done and Walser’s mildly satirical (and ironic) prose style deployed to describe various sycophants in Goethe’s circle is amusing.

But the rest of the book is pretty much intolerable.  The last hundred pages are mostly epistolary – a disastrous decision, I think, by Walser.  The writer imagines a series of the poet’s letters dispatched to Ulrike and, then, presents these writings as evidence of Goethe’s utter dismay and paranoia as the obvious becomes evident to him – Ulrike is not going to marry a man almost 55 years older than her.  The first two thirds of the novel, although frequently overwrought, is anchored, nonetheless, in a recognizable objective reality – the milieu of the baths with their ritual concerts and soirees and balls.  The last third of the book is maddeningly subjective: Goethe rants for a hundred pages, becomes increasingly and demonically possessive of the young woman and, then, the novel just ends.  Of course, in the middle of this torrent of self-destructive passion, Goethe writes the great Marienbad Elegy and sends it to Ulrike.  Embedding the elegy in the over-heated prose comprising the last part of the book doesn’t increase our esteem for the verse.  In fact, it has the opposite effect: Walser trivializes the dignified, if passionate, language of the elegy but flanking it with the poet’s idiotic harangues.  He actually succeeds in diminishing the beauty and fascination of one of the German language’s most important monuments. 

It’s not true that nothing really occurs in the last third of the novel – the book’s paralyzed style simply causes the reader to feel that way.  In fact, Goethe quarrels, at length, with Ottilie, who resents his interest in the girl.  He writes the elegy and sends it to the teenager (who effusively professes to admire it.)  Goethe gets sick and almost dies.  Alexander von Humboldt, the great explorer and scientist, reads the elegy and admires it.  The obnoxious “Velocifer”, Don Juan de Ror (as Goethe imagines his first name) appears in Stuttgart and campaigns for Ulrike’s affections in the most vulgar way imaginable – he offers her gemstone earrings for her lovely ear-lobes and gives her an emerald necklace as well.  When Ulrike writes that she is going on a date with de Ror, Goethe flies into a titanic rage and this seems to weaken him so that he becomes ill and almost perishes.  When he recovers sufficiently, he re-initiates his letter-writing campaign, accusing Ulrike of all sorts of wickedness in the most self-pitying manner imaginable.  It’s all very distasteful: Germany’s greatest poet as a kind of stalker. 

Here’s a glimpse of what this stuff looks like:

In a letter, Goethe says that the world is full of charming young women: (But) for me none of them are unique.  Perhaps, I am the only one who experiences your uniqueness.  It’s not really imaginable.  But I’m glad to think it.  If I’m the only one who experiences you as unique and singular, then you must be mine.  This is most charming, a most Platonic fairy-tale to imagine: each person is only singular for a single human being.  And you are that for me.  I won’t tally your unique features or the color of your hair.  If you are the only one for me, then, it remains to ask: am I the only one for you?  I’m not.  If I were truly singular, you would have come to me long ago.  Broken out, climbed up to me even in rain and storm, without any regard for orderliness and good morals, without regard for any opposition.  You are nonetheless unique as far as I am concerned.  This asymmetry between us is the shears by which I measure my misfortune...

The German word repeatedly used for “unique” is Einzigarten – singular/unique (literally “one of a kind.” ) Of course, the fictional Goethe’s bad faith is staggering.  If Ulrike’s so important to him, why doesn’t he go to her?  Why does this young girl have to rescue him?  The diction suggests that Goethe is like the poor maiden confined in her tower.  The poet wants her to “climb up” to him in the raging tempest.  A little of this trash goes a long way and the book ends with a hundred pages of it.

Furthermore, Walser’s imagery can be breathtakingly vulgar.  Consider this embarrassing passage:

It was in evening as they sat before the “Golden Bouquet”and the moon rose over the Dreikreuzberg (at Karlsbad).  And with her at the Sprudel (a sort of geyser), he (Goethe) gazed wordlessly at the jet of water shooting high in the air, water that just didn’t spray monotonously above them as if standing as a lofty water column there in the arcade, but rather jerks upward, shoots up, pauses for a quarter second, then, spasms, shooting again high over them.  As he, with Ulrike and all the other spa-guests, stood there, he didn’t know what they were all thinking as they beheld this lofty-spewing water-wonder.  And he found that it was all going awry!  Why couldn’t one express, why shouldn’t one express what one so powerfully felt?   He sensed the rhythm in his member, that so wished to be everything to him.  And Ulrike?  And all the others? When he and Ulrike on the way back touched a little, he felt completely happy.  But never again would he and Ulrike see the Sprudel twitching...

This is pretty awful on all levels.  First, Walser doesn’t need to spell out what the throbbing cloud of white frothy water and steam means.  Anyone can figure this out without recourse to the road map that the writer provides.  Second, the whole thing is disingenuous.  Goethe is never showing making an attempt to act on his desires (probably mercifully given the way Walser writes about sex.)  Furthermore, the description of Goethe’s penis as his “member” (the German word Teil, or “part”) is simply risible.  If you’ve spent much time engaged with German popular culture, the use of “part” as an euphemism will trigger (unavoidably I think) fond recollections of the Rammstein song “Mein Teil.”  This heavy metal anthem narrates the story of the German masochist who advertised in the lonely heart’s columns for someone who would be willing to eat him.  The masochist located Mr. Right who invited him to his kitchen, cut off his penis and served it nicely sliced, sauteed and with garlic.  Rammstein’s lyrics ingeniously pun on the German word Teil which in a culinary context might mean “my portion”.  My problem is that the Rammstein song, a catchy tune in its own bombastic way, overwhelms Walser’s prose and makes it unintentionally laughable.       

There’s a term applicable to Walser’s novel invoked by Vladimir Nabokov in his critical work, particularly his book-length essay on Gogol.  The word is poshlust denoting pretentious kitsch in bad taste.  ELM veritably defines poshlust by example.  Nabokov argues that the Germans are particularly susceptible to this failing.  He illustrates this contention by an anecdote involving a robust and lusty young German who longed to make love to a beautiful maiden.  The girl lived in a home next to a lake. The enterprising German swain swam naked in the lake daily, exhibiting his lithe form to the young woman.  But, still, she paid no attention to him.  A couple of swans frequented the lake and the lovelorn bather interfered with them in some way – Nabokov doesn’t specify exactly what he did, but his efforts with the fowl caught the young woman’s attention.  Promptly, thereafter, she fell in love with the boy and, apparently, married him.  This little narrative, Nabokov maintains exemplifies poshlust.  And so does Ein Liebender Mann.

Writers are competitive by nature and its clear that Walser’s instincts with respect to his great forebear’s last love affair are tinted with jealousy, envy, and a not inconsiderable quantum of Schadenfreude.  But Walser is too decorous to mount a frontal attack on the Great Man.  A really bold novel would knock Goethe into bed with his betrothed and relish his sexual inadequacy.  Walser seems intent on vandalism with respect to conventional portraits of Goethe – but the best he can do is to scribble a moustache on his hero’s upper-lip.  He makes Goethe look vaguely ridiculous but doesn’t really draw blood.